ah, i see. but does this explain the high estimated reward? if the pool were to find a block now would i receive that amount?if so, it must be to the loss of someone finding shares before the renormalization? or what am i missing here?

The values of shares decreases over time, and people have been dropping out since the pool may be stuck. As their shares lose value, and as you find more shares, your estimated reward grows. The "renormalization" every hour just scales everyones score the same so that the number doesn't get too big for the program to handle.

As we slide down the banister of life, this is just another splinter in our ass.

I had two workers that I turned off early in the round because it's a warm day and I tend to run a few only during the night. They had found ~50 and 9 shares prior to turning off. Looking now, I see their scores were zero (probably decayed to zero after they were offline for ~6 hours). I turned them both back on just to see what would happen, and found a few proof of works fairly quickly, and the scores went up accordingly. This seemed to add quite a bit to the estimated reward within a short amount of time (>0.10 BTC).

It may be that my other miners (all GPU's) had some really good luck within that timeframe as well, or that the late entry into the round means these new proofs of work are scored much higher, perhaps also because there's old proofs of work already there. I'm unsure, this is conjecture. Just thought I'd share.

The accepted explanation for an invalid is that someone else submitted the solution a split second before the pool did. And only at this point did the two parts of the network join up to confirm which one actually found it first.

I had two workers that I turned off early in the round because it's a warm day and I tend to run a few only during the night. They had found ~50 and 9 shares prior to turning off. Looking now, I see their scores were zero (probably decayed to zero after they were offline for ~6 hours). I turned them both back on just to see what would happen, and found a few proof of works fairly quickly, and the scores went up accordingly. This seemed to add quite a bit to the estimated reward within a short amount of time (>0.10 BTC)

Cheating will be much more effective with new scoring - you just need to start some ~20 minutes after new block.